Prep / 1 Mainstream
Celebrating Learning
What we have been up to:
What a busy few weeks our F/1s have had! Our NAIDOC event last Thursday was an absolute hit. It was so great to see our community and school getting involved to celebrate our First Nations families within our community through this year’s theme, ‘The Next Generation: Strength, Vision and Legacy’. The students participated in lots of activities that centred around this year’s theme.
Thank you to our families for your patience, it has been a very busy start to Term 3 with lots of timetable disruptions! We appreciate your understanding.
PBL (play-based learning):
Due to a few changes to our regular timetable, we have missed quite a few PBL sessions this term! We were able to get back into the swing of things this week by recommencing our conversations from week one about building on how we respond to our friends’ ideas can influence an outcome. For example, being positive and open to someone’s ideas or suggestions can grow an idea into something wonderful and unexpected.
Maths:
We finished off our first big focus on place value last week where students worked on a number of puzzles focusing on 0-30 (Foundation) and 0-120 (Year 1). These puzzles tested students' knowledge of important place value skills such as finding the number before and after and making sure a two digit number is written correctly (tens first then ones).
We have started moving into our addition and subtraction unit by talking about how a number can be partitioned in different ways. 10 can be made up of 5+5 but it can also be broken into 2+3+5.
Writing:
As we have become more familiar with retelling narrative stories, our students are getting a really clear idea about the structure of a story. We are zooming in different parts of a text and discussing describing words (adjectives) to describe settings and characters.
Reading:
An integral part of building fluency is reading out loud to a partner and receiving feedback. This gives students the chance to notice how reading words accurately impacts their own and their partners' understanding of the text. A listening partner can assist their reading partner to read a word accurately by saying:
- “That word is _____”
- “What’s that word?”
- “Good. Can you read that sentence again, please?”
We have gradually been introducing paragraph shrinking in our classrooms to assist with reading comprehension. Paragraph shrinking helps build student understanding of the text and therefore improves fluency. Students are asked to “shrink” either a very short page or paragraph of the text by identifying who the text is mostly about and what the most thing is that has happened. Students then say the main idea in a sentence that is 10 words or less.
In our reading groups over the past two weeks we have been focussing on the following sounds:
Juliette and Jess:
- Double letters such as /ll/ as in hill, /ss/ as in mess and /ff/ as in puff.
- Breaking words into syllables to help us with our spelling.
- Adding suffix /_s/ and /es/ to the end of nouns to make them plurals
- Verbs are action words
Matt was learning:
- /or/ as in shorts
- /aw/ as in saw
- /al/ as in metal
- /ore/ as in snore
Steph was learning:
- /oi/ as in soil
- /oy/ as in toy
- /oo/ as in oops
What’s to come in the next two weeks:
- Thank you for continuing to support your children to take home readers and practise at home.
- In maths we will start to move into addition and subtraction. Keep your eyes peeled in upcoming newsletters for addition and subtraction card game suggestions that might help your child practise at home.
- Thanks to families who have donated cardboard boxes! If you have some lying around at home that you would be willing to bring in, hand them in to Jess or Juliette. We will be using these in PBL in the upcoming weeks.
- Please keep sending warm spare clothes as PBL can be very messy in the colder months!
- Book week is next week! Check compass for more information about Bookweek events.
- Swimming is coming up in week 9. More information to follow.
warmly
Juliette and Jess